GENERAL REMARKS. 
435 
pecuniary position for the moment. If the first mow- 
ing of the season is made under the receipt of an in- 
creased or unexpected dividend, the lawn gets a swarth 
or two more, and a cock or two of hay is subtracted 
from the harvest ; while the next year, under a smaller 
income, thrift conquers taste, and the lawn, instead of 
being shorn of its grass, is shorn of its fair proportions. 
In order to make some appropriate boundary or divis- 
ion between the lawn and the park, or hay-field ; in other 
words, between the dressed and undressed portions of 
the estate, great use has been made of late years of the 
wire fence or hurdle. By its adoption we might dimin- 
ish the amount of lawn now kept under the scythe, ob- 
taining similar results by substituting cattle — especially 
sheep — and increasing very much the charm of the 
landscape by the introduction of animated nature. 
The keenest eye can hardly detect a wire fence at 
thirty or forty rods distance ; consequently our finest 
places do not really require a lawn larger than twice 
this breadth in diameter, provided the grass on the 
other side of the wire is kept equally short by sheep. 
It is quite astonishing in England how very small the 
proportion of mown lawn is to that part which, by use 
of invisible wire fencing, is kept equally short and 
almost in as fine order, by grazing. 
At Windsor Castle we doubt if the mown border or 
strip of grass round the park-side of the castle exceeds 
fifty to one hundred feet up to the wire fence, beyond 
which, in the park, are large masses of rhododenrons, 
laurels, Portugal laurels, etc., protected from thousands 
of deer and sheep which surround them, by invisible wire 
fences. 
At Longleat, the magnificent seat of the Marquis of 
Bath — which Charles II. on his return from his exile 
then considered the finest place in England — there is a 
strip of three hundred feet of mown lawn planted 
with rare shrubs, between the river and one side only 
